Older Releases

Changes in 2015

New in 20151222:

Terminals now support "true" color (24-bit, millions) by default. Both standard and common non-standard variants are emulated. For example, a shell command like 'printf "\033[1;38:2::245:;48:2:40:177:249m hello \033[0m\n"' would print the word 'hello' in bold green text on a bluish background, and so would 'printf "\033[1;38;2;0;245;0;48;2;40;177;249m hello \033[0m\n"'.

Terminals do not allow an unending set of "true" colors to be defined. Currently, after 2048 new colors have been requested in a particular terminal view, the oldest will start being reassigned. The original 256 indexed colors do not count toward this limit however, as long as they are requested using the simpler indexing color sequences.

Preferences window Terminals pane Emulation tab now offers the tweak "24-Bit Color (Millions)", which is enabled by default. It is recommended that this always be enabled; while a small amount of memory would be saved by disabling it, applications would also have access to fewer colors. It is possible however that old terminal-based programs may be confused by the non-standard color emulation that is supported in 24-bit color mode.

New in 20151019:

Terminal graphics characters now include updated renderings for various arrows, diamonds and bullets.

Terminal graphics characters have been tweaked to look better at large font sizes (preventing over-scaling of line widths in some cases).

New in 20150926:

Terminal graphics characters are now rendered in a new way, improving quality in many cases. Many of them are also rendered without system fonts, which allows MacTerm to carefully scale certain characters and connect them to neighboring cells where appropriate.

Terminal graphics characters now cover the entire "Box Drawing" set of Unicode 8.0. This adds new capabilities such as curved-corner lines, dotted lines, half-lines and other line variations.

Terminal graphics characters now cover the entire "Block Elements" set of Unicode 8.0.

Terminal graphics characters now include a variety of other glyphs, such as brackets used in mathematical expressions.

Terminal graphics characters now directly support "powerline" (a popular extension), providing renderings for several of its internal Unicode sequences without requiring patched fonts. This includes full-height triangles, chevrons, a "version control branch" character, a padlock, and others.

New in 20150919:

Terminal graphics characters now cover more of the Greek alphabet, especially for mathematics.

New in 20150810:

Help web page styles have been slightly tweaked.

New in 20150808:

Terminal windows now use significantly less memory while empty. For instance, a new terminal window now requires NO memory for its entire scrollback buffer, even if that buffer is thousands of lines long (the space is requested only as it is required).

Terminal window search is now MUCH faster by default, as a side effect of aggressively sharing blank space. The search performance degrades with the number of non-blank lines to be searched; windows with large scrollback buffers that have been open for a long time will take longer to scan.

New in 20150807:

Preferences window Macros pane now offers two new Action types: "Find in Local Terminal Verbatim" and "Find in Local Terminal with Substitutions", to automatically highlight all matching search results based on the macro content. The "Find Next" and "Find Previous" commands rotate through the results normally.

Macros of type "Find in Local Terminal with Substitutions" recognize the same substitution characters as the similar action type "Enter Text with Substitutions". Note in particular, the sequences that operate on text selections ("\s", "\j" and "\q") can be used to initiate terminal searches based on text that you have selected. Also, an expression like "word\n" or "word\r" causes the search to only match at the end of a line (ignoring whitespace).

Contextual menus will now automatically display any named macro with an Action of "Find in Local Terminal with Substitutions" if it uses any of the text-selection sequences ("\s", "\j" or "\q") and there is currently text selected in the terminal window.

New in 20150723:

Vector graphics windows can now be made Full Screen.

Vector graphics windows may now be created while a terminal window is Full Screen (via "New TEK Page"). If the terminal is using the system full-screen style, the new graphics window automatically becomes Full Screen in a new Space. Note however that the terminal window must still be used for keyboard input.

Function Keys palette pop-up menu now has a Yosemite arrow style.

New in 20150710:

Fixed Rename command to immediately update the title displayed in the Window menu.

Terminal window rendering performance has substantially improved.

New in 20150630:

Custom New Session sheet has been reimplemented in Cocoa, which makes it look much better on Retina displays. The new sheet also supports inheritance features and the ability to quickly add settings to Preferences.

New in 20150528:

Several sheets (Custom Screen Size, Custom Format, Custom Key Sequences, Custom Text Translation) have been reimplemented in Cocoa, which makes them look much better on Retina displays. The new sheets also support inheritance features that were previously only available in the Custom Format sheet.

New in 20150512:

Fixed minor animation quirks, including an issue that could make "duplicated" windows choose inconvenient positions.

New in 20150505:

Changed the artwork for document icons to match Yosemite style.

Various other minor updates to icon artwork.

New in 20150308:

Fixed "Show Completions" for Full Screen windows (items in the completion menu are no longer disabled).

New in 20150303:

"Completions" for words can now be found by invoking the "Show Completions" command of the Edit menu (or using the Option-Escape key sequence). The base for search is either the currently-selected text or the word that is nearest the terminal cursor. Conceptually, completions behave as if you had performed a dynamic search for the base text in the terminal, and "double-clicked" each matching location to produce whole words.

"Completions" enter only a subset of the chosen string, based on the text currently at the cursor position. For example, if the characters at the cursor are "he" and you select the completion "hello", only "llo" will be sent to the terminal.

"Completions" display numerical key equivalents for the first few choices. And, like any menu, you can navigate items via the keyboard (use arrow keys, type letters to select items, or press Escape to dismiss the menu).

"Completions" do not require a text selection (the word nearest the cursor is used) but the existing keyboard-based text selection mode can be useful if a selection is desired. Namely, you can often hold down the Shift key and press arrow keys to highlight text prior to requesting completions.

"Completions" define "words" based on the same rules as double-clicks, which incidentally can be overridden using the Python API. Note that this can cause completions without punctuation to be included even when a base word has punctuation.

"Completions" can only match words that are somewhere in the terminal buffer. In particular, if your scrollback settings allow some unique text to scroll into oblivion, it can no longer appear in a completion.

"Completions" match any part of a word. Example: if the lower-case letter "e" is the base selection and the words "hello, "Echo" and "lace" all appear on the terminal screen or in its scrollback, all 3 words will be shown as completions.

New in 20150101:

Preferences now exist for automatically starting a file capture when a session begins. Currently, this can only be set using the beta version of the new Preferences window that is available from the debug interface. A file may have a constant name or it may contain template variables (\D for the date in YYYY-MM-DD form, \T for the time in HHMMSS form, \\ for a backslash).